Rhinocrisy

Some idiots at Cornell^* proposed in Nature this week to “re-wild” the American Great Plains with mega-fauna. Their argument is “justified on ecological, evolutionary, economic, aesthetic and ethical grounds,” they say. So they’re going to bring in creatures from around the world, including Bolson tortoises, Asian wild horses, bactrian camels, elephants, lions and cheetahs. The authors say, “[H]umans were probably at least partly responsible for the Late Pleistocene extinctions in North America, and our subsequent activities have curtailed the evolutionary potential of most remaining large vertebrates. We therefore bear an ethical responsibility to redress these problems.”

But why stop there? After all, the real victims are the animals we drove out and replaced. I have a better proposal, similarly justified on ecological, evolutionary, economic, aesthetic and ethical grounds. Let’s truly atone for our crimes; let’s bring back the mammoth. This isn’t ridiculous, after all. There’s probably plenty of available mammoth DNA. They only were wiped out 10,000 years ago, and plenty of nearly intact carcasses have been preserved in ice. Now that the Siberian permafrost is thawing and massive numbers of mammoth carcasses are unfreezing, there should be ample opportunity to recover mammoth DNA and to reconstruct the mammoth genome. Actually, given the sample of DNA likely available, we should be able to recover a substantial fraction of mammoth genetic diversity. Thus we should be able to reconstruct a very robust mammoth population, and if we continue seeding it with individuals for several generations we should maintain a healthy amount of variation. Such a population would already be well-adapted to the North American climate. Providing, of course, that they aren’t killed off by global warming in the first few decades.

In fact, this scenario provides for even better ethical opportunities, viz., poetic justice. Hopefully, after we resurrect the mammoth, we ourselves will be wiped out by plague, drought, or some other type of holocaust. Somewhere down the line, mammoths will then develop intelligence and civilization. Eventually, when faced with their strange history, and that of their destroyers/re-creators, they’ll have to ponder the conundrum of whether they should resurrect us (using DNA from bodies preserved under layers of snack-food-cake wrappers). And when they ultimately decide, “No, they’re better off dead,” a big bell will ring somewhere to signify how beautifully ironic this really is.

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Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of conservation efforts, and I think human beings should indeed keep an eye out for the health of other species’ populations. But there’s some hard realities we just have to acknowledge. Foremost is that we ARE a cancer on this planet. We are a scourge that MUST destroy other species. It’s simply impossible for us to consume the level of resources we consume and not affect the balance of life. Especially for megafauna, which require elaborate webs of creatures spreading beneath them to sustain their bulk. For all their size, they’re delicate, and our voraciousness means they cannot survive. Period.

The other is that the past is past. Justice does not mean merely undoing the mistakes of the past. Time only flows in one direction; it can’t be made to turn around. What’s justice is learning from the past and living better now and in the future because of it.

Life WILL survive on this planet. And whenever we happen to die off - whether in a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand or a million years - life will continue. Living things will continue to evolve, and grow. And grow larger. That’s inevitable. That’s happened many times in the past - massive extinction events followed by regrowth. Of a different flavor, to be sure, always fresh-faced. But that’s the way life works. Death, rebirth, growth.

If, on the other hand, we want to be around to see it, the way to do that is not to attempt to unravel the skein of history. It’s simply to be less voracious.

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^* Specifically, one graduate student Josh Donlan, who I predict will have one hell of a time trying to get a faculty position anywhere better than Seton Hall University.